Revitalizing the United Nations
Reform Through Weighted Voting
By Joseph E. Shwartzberg

This book outlines one proposal for reform of the Security Council and General Assembly. The theory discussed in this book would depend on members' population, financial contribution to the UN budget and share of the total UN membership.

The argument is well-reasoned and thoroughly documented. If the UN is to be taken seriously as a policy-making body, the voting system in both the main bodies, the Security Council and the General Assembly, must be revised. In the Security Council, veto power has been granted "in perpetuity" to five nations, nations that just so happened to be on the winning side of World War II and two of which (the Republic of China and the Soviet Union) no longer even exist. In the General Assembly, each country has one vote regardless of its population...or economic influence. Only after a rational voting system has been established will the UN be transformed into a credible policymaking body for the world community.

The solution, Schwartzberg argues persuasively, is a weighted voting system that takes into account population (the democratic/demographic principle), contribution to the UN budget (the economic principle), and share of the total membership (the legal principle). Each country is assigned a weighted vote on the basis of these three factors.

Schwartzberg discusses the difficulty of effecting the changes he proposes. Still, he argues, the present situation resulting from the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S. requires that world leaders "come to grips with the new global realities." He pleads for action to reform the UN, either by adopting specific amendments to the Charter such as he is proposing or by holding a conference to review the Charter. The UN must be reformed so that it can "realize the dream that its creators set forth in the preamble to the Charter: to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war . . ."

In addition to the wealth of information in the text, this monograph contains six appendices containing massive amounts of valuable data about the 191 member-states of the UN and how that information is related to the proposals for weighted voting. This is an invaluable booklet that all world federalists should have in their personal library.

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